This invention relates to a multipanel liquid crystal display device and a method of manufacturing the same. More particularly, this invention relates to a liquid crystal display device formed by combining two or four liquid crystal display panels to increase the displayable area and relates also to a method of manufacturing such a display device.
The size of a single liquid crystal display panel has a limitation due to the technical difficulty of manufacturing large-sized ones, and the size of such a display panel presently available is commonly only about 10 cm.times.10 cm. Even in the case of a large-sized liquid crystal display panel made on an experimental basis in a laboratory, its size is 20 cm.times.20 cm at the maximum. Therefore, in order to provide a large displayable area, a plurality of liquid crystal display panels are combined together to form a multipanel liquid crystal display device as disclosed in, for example, Japanese patent laid-open application, JP No.-A-61-77884. However, such a prior art multipanel liquid crystal display device has a problem which will be described with reference to FIG. 8 of the drawings.
FIG. 8 is a schematic sectional view showing the structure of a joint between liquid crystal display panels in such a prior art display device. Referring to FIG. 8, a pair of liquid crystal display panels 100 of small size, each including a pair of spaced glass plates 101, a liquid crystal 102 filled in a gap between the glass plates 101 and sealed by a sealing member 103, and electrode terminals 104, are joined together at their confronting ends by a solder material 105 interconnecting the electrode terminals 104 of the adjoining liquid crystal display panels 100.
It will be seen in FIG. 8 that in order to interconnect the liquid crystal display panels 100 in the prior art, the sealing members 103 are necessarily disposed adjacent to the confronting ends of the liquid crystal panels 100 and a substantial space is required between the confronting ends of the panels for electrically connecting the electrode terminals 104 to each other by the solder material 105. Thus, there exists an elongated narrow non-display area or blank portion between the confronting ends of every adjacent two display panels. Therefore, the prior art multipanel liquid crystal display device has a problem that a lattice-like blank portion having a width of about 2 mm is inevitably formed at the joint between the display panels.